A friend of mine with whom I share time, coffee
and bagels at my local Starbucks engaged me recently in a
conversation about home invasions. The chatter quickly turned to the
shooting of Trayvon Martin and the so-called "Stand Your Ground"
law.

"If someone broke into your house while you are
sitting in your den watching TV and you had your gun beside you,
would you wait and see if he will attack you or would you shoot to
kill?" my friend asked.

My response was simple: "Anyone daring enough to
break into my home while I am present and inside, is asking me to
sign his death warrant."

In Virginia, we have a law similar to Florida's
"Stand Your Ground" statute. It is off-handedly called the "Castle
Doctrine."

The Castle Doctrine basically allows for the
homeowner or resident of a home or apartment to defend it and
himself even with the use of deadly force. The idea here is that
anyone breaking into a home with the occupants present is deemed a
threat, possibly a deadly threat.

But back to the conversation on
"Stand Your Ground," since the Trayvon Martin
shooting in Sanford, Fla., made headlines, various
commentators have called on states to repeal their
“Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws. New York
mayor Michael Bloomberg has called Stand Your Ground a
“license to murder.” However, these laws are reasonable
protections for citizens who defend themselves, and in
fact they are unlikely to determine the fate of Martin’s
shooter, George Zimmerman.

States without these laws typically
impose a “duty to retreat.” This means that when a
person is attacked, he may not fight back unless he is
unable to get away safely. A Castle Doctrine law removes
this duty on one’s own property, and a Stand Your Ground
law removes this duty in public places, allowing victims
to meet force with force. In Florida, victims may assert
immunity from prosecution under Stand Your Ground — but
they have to prove to a judge at an evidentiary hearing,
by a preponderance of the evidence, that they acted in
self-defense.

These laws typically include
safeguards to avoid abuse. For example, the Castle
Doctrine sometimes does not apply to conflicts between
two people who live in the same house. And Florida’s
Stand Your Ground law justifies lethal force only if a
person reasonably fears death or serious injury. It also
does not apply if the alleged victim was engaged in
illegal activity when the attack happened.

It is unsurprising that Stand Your
Ground came under fire; when the police initially
refused to arrest George Zimmerman, they claimed that
Zimmerman’s self-defense claim was too difficult to
overcome. But the special prosecutor is pressing
second-degree-murder charges against Zimmerman, and it
seems unlikely that the lack of a “duty to retreat” will
affect the outcome.

To justify his claim of self-defense,
Zimmerman says that Martin attacked him without
provocation, and then knocked him down and beat him. If
this is true, Zimmerman had no ability to retreat — and
thus would have had no duty to retreat even under the
old law. If something else happened to spark the
physical confrontation and Zimmerman was the aggressor,
his behavior was likely unlawful — a fact that, again,
removes him from the protection of Stand Your Ground.
The only effect the law is likely to have is to allow
Zimmerman to assert immunity on self-defense grounds in
a pre-trial hearing, before his case is heard by a jury.

The Martin case aside, some have
noted that many prosecutors dislike Stand Your Ground.
But as Reason’s Jacob Sullum has pointed out,
this is unsurprising: The entire purpose of Stand Your
Ground is to make it more difficult for prosecutors to
obtain convictions in cases where self-defense may have
occurred.

For similar reasons, critics are
wrong to assume it’s problematic when “justifiable
homicide” rulings increase following the enactment of
Stand Your Ground — in many of these cases, justice was
served. What’s more, justifiable-homicide trends are
not markedly different in states with and without
Stand Your Ground, so it’s unclear that the law even has
this effect. It’s also worth bearing in mind that
despite doubling over the course of the previous decade,
nationwide justifiable homicides totaled only 326 in
2010. The typical year sees 16,000 total killings.

Other commentators have turned to
specific cases as proof that Stand Your Ground is
problematic. Some of these cases involve murky
situations, and the government simply failed to
demonstrate that self-defense did not occur.

There have been cases, however, in
which Stand Your Ground has led to questionable rulings.
In one recent Florida case, a man chased a thief who’d
stolen his car radio for more than a block. When the
thief swung a bag of radios at him, the man stabbed the
thief to death, returned to his apartment to sleep, and
later sold two of the radios and hid the knife. Despite
Stand Your Ground’s requirement that someone reasonably
fear death or great bodily harm before resorting to
lethal force, and despite its seeming highly likely that
the thief was trying to escape with his plunder rather
than maim or kill his victim, a judge granted the
stabber immunity.

It was immediately clear that the
problem was the ruling, not the law: “How can it be
Stand Your Ground?” a homicide investigator who worked
on the case asked in bewilderment. “It’s on
[surveillance] video! You can see him stabbing the
victim.” If Stand Your Ground can be further clarified
to prevent abuse, it should be, but any law can lead to
injustice if its text is blatantly disregarded.

Simply put, it is unreasonable to
demand that crime victims go out of their way to avoid
fighting back. Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine
laws remove that demand, and the case of Trayvon Martin
should not inspire their repeal.

We believe that the Constitution of the
United States speaks for itself. There is no need to rewrite, change
or reinterpret it to suit the fancies of special interest groups or
protected classes.